Comment by cyberax 17 hours ago
And BTW, I agree that Social Security overhead is unacceptable. It should be privatized and increased to at least $500 billion to be comparable with health insurance companies.
It's not acceptable at all to make private companies look bad.
It can happen yes, but VCs have very strong incentives to not waste their own money, if they feel like putting the effort into it. If they fail they may learn the lesson not to waste money, or even end up not having money to waste. In the government all the incentives are the opposite, to keep spending money or the budget would get reduced next year. If anyone tries to save costs, they make a lot of enemies both within and outside. They get nothing if they succeed, so the incentives are bad.
I think you may have a flawed understanding of how VCs work. VCs generally care little for one company does. That’s what the whole “invest in 500 startups” strategy is about. Now a $200M investment probably starts to leave that range and enters the “throw weight around to win”, but generally they care little about the software except as a means to an end to get returns and business growth and software value are only loosely correlated.
Startup companies blow through hundreds of millions of VC dollars with little to show for it all the time. Theranos raised $700 million for a technology that never worked. Plenty of others wasted hundreds of millions building half-baked products that nobody wanted or that made no business sense. Remember Quibi?
The difference is that those companies eventually fail. The govt has essentially limitless taxpayer money behind it(till a currency crisis like Argentina, Greece etc. happens taking down the entire economy) because paying it is enforced by threat of violence and it can borrow and print money as much as it wants with deficit spending.
Also Theranos was aiming for something very innovative that still does not exist, whereas the govt IT systems are essentially glorified CRUD apps(no doubt complicated and with tricky integrations and need for reliability and security). It's an example where VCs could've exerted more scrutiny but chose not to and wasted their own money, hopefully a lesson learnt. As taxpayers, we have far fewer options, we cannot just pass on paying out hard earned money if we don't want to "invest".
Another example, the Queensland payroll system cost $1.2 billion over 8 years to develop, repair and maintain, to pay just 87K people. The initial estimated budget? $6.9 million.
> Also Theranos was aiming for something very innovative that still does not exist, whereas the govt IT systems are essentially glorified CRUD apps(no doubt complicated and with tricky integrations and need for reliability and security).
I worked both in the area of molecular biology and bioinformatics with some pretty nifty technology (which was later acquired by a large company). And in the area of giant ERP applications that are nothing but tons of boring forms.
I can confidently say that the complexity of ERP apps dwarfs anything that is needed for molecular biology.
> Can you imagine raising $288 million from VCs for a software application while delivering so little?
What? You're imagining VCs caring about pizza money? Should I mention, perhaps, the AOL-TimeWarner merger? Or maybe AT&T buying DirecTV for $50B and essentially giving it away for $8B?
Heck, I was a part of an utterly failed project with a $150m budget (in 2005), in a large European company.
> For the main system they're also using COBOL, which has no Date data type, causing issues even in 2025.
And? They haven't missed a single payment day in all their existence, moving data between multiple types of media. While working with staff levels that won't even qualify as "skeleton" in plenty of companies.
> Heck, I was a part of an utterly failed project with a $150m budget (in 2005), in a large European company
Was it a just a somewhat complex CRUD app like the SSA example or most govt IT projects? Or were you guys trying for something more complicated and innovative and failed?
It was an ERP application from a large three-letter European company. In other words, a CRUD app with lots of UI forms. Nothing innovative or particularly interesting.
The hardware to deploy it was alone a couple of million. At least, I got to play with some rather cool gear (for that time).
If it was a company it'd have failed already.
> The program, called the Disability Case Processing System, or DCPS, was designed to improve case processing and enhance customer service. But six years and $288 million later the program has “delivered limited functionality and faced schedule delays as well as increasing stakeholder concerns
https://fedscoop.com/problem-project-threatens-progress-soci...
And that's just one instance.
Can you imagine raising $288 million from VCs for a software application while delivering so little?
But taxpayer money? Free and easy money to keep wasting coz no one cares. Tragedy of the commons.
For the main system they're also using COBOL, which has no Date data type, causing issues even in 2025.